British culture will disappear if immigration remains uncontrolled, Suella Braverman has warned.
Speaking during a visit to the US, the Home Secretary said in a speech that migration to the UK and Europe in the past 25 years had been “too much, too quick” with too little thought given to integration and social cohesion rather than the “failed dogma of multiculturalism”.
Citing the 108,000 migrants who had illegally crossed the Channel since 2018 and the 2.8 million who had entered the US this year, Braverman said uncontrolled immigration made it “harder for society to adapt and accommodate new cultures and customs” as she set out her proposals for world nations to tackle the problem.
“If cultural change is too rapid and too big, then what was already there is diluted. Eventually it will disappear,” she told an invited audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a Right-of-centre think tank in Washington DC.
Braverman, echoing comments made earlier this week, said the migration issue demonstrated the need to revise the “outdated” 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which had produced a “absurd and unsustainable” system with “huge incentives for illegal migration.”
She urged the international community to follow the United Kingdom’s lead in refusing asylum to migrants unless they arrived in a country via a recognised safe and legal route, limiting the definition of who may claim to be a refugee, and adopting policies such as the Government’s Rwanda expulsion policy.
She blamed the Convention’s failure to reform on the fear of “being labelled a racist or illiberal.”
“Any attempt to reform the Refugee Convention will see you smeared as anti-refugee. Similar epithets are hurled at anyone who suggests reform of the European Convention on Human Rights or its court in Strasbourg,” she said.
On Tuesday night, the UN’s High Commission for Refugees hit back, saying: “The need is not for reform, or more restrictive interpretation, but for stronger and more consistent application of the Convention and its underlying principle of responsibility-sharing.”